What I do want to point out is that Sullivan is someone who has spoken out against income inequality recently, and that inequality-- the steep and terrible decline of workers-- is and will remain her most obvious and enduring legacy. Here's part of what Thatcher meant for the UK:
What Thatcher meant in material terms for the United Kingdom was fewer jobs and worse compensation for those who had them. And as she was such a warrior against social programs, she also ensured that governmental assistance to ease this pain was reduced. This was not some sad unintended consequence of her policies. It was her policy. The Reaganite-Thatcherite revolution was an unapologetic and purposeful attempt to hurt workers relative to capital. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. That project has not changed. The neoliberal policy regime that has thrown its weight against workers to the betterment of the rich has not left power in the United States or the UK since Reagan and Thatcher, and they are continuing the work, despite the system-wide crisis for workers. This is the legacy of the neoliberal turn here in America:
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And that chart doesn't begin to encompass what a terrible time workers are having right now: underpaid, lacking benefits, lacking in job security, deprived of negotiating power, subject to the fickleness of short-term economic conditions in an economy dominated by riverboat gamblers, somehow both underemployed and overworked, and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. Conditions are worsening for workers all over, and everyone fears the next great crash.
Sullivan has a host of admirable qualities as a writer and a thinker, including a rare and valuable capacity for self-criticism and changing his mind. But I just think he's too much of an old Tory to ever think of politics in terms of simple class antagonism and power relations to really understand how our policy apparatus has set out to screw the common person at the behest of the wealthy, or how Thatcher was complicit in that effort.
I was born in 1981. The most significant story of America in my lifetime, the one that will do more to dictate America's future and the American character for the next century, is the decline of work and the immiseration of workers. That is the most important development in American history in 30 years. Not 9/11 or either Iraq war, not the presidencies of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, not the rise of the Internet, not our first black president or both political parties nominating women for the vice presidential ticket, not urbanization or global warming. The decline of working life is most significant because it has done most to undermine our social contract. The American Dream was always something of a lie, a dream deferred for black people and women and those lacking in received privilege. But now the lie has gotten bigger and harder to ignore. Yet all of the macroeconomic effort to arrive at this position of a total winner-take-all economy, an inegalitarian world of a few thousand Elois and hundreds of millions of Morlocks, received the direct blessing of Margaret Thatcher. A world of many losers and a few lucky winners is the world Thatcher wanted.
Sullivan speaks in his piece of a backlash, of how the Britain of his youth became the Britain of Thatcher because people had enough. My only enduring hope is that a similar backlash is coming, that the insane pursuit of the immiseration of the worker that was begun by people like Thatcher and Reagan and their cronies has pushed common people to the edge. Perhaps when they finally explode, they will do so in a way that leads us to the next great evolution of human economy, towards socialism, and the total repudiation of the individualist ethic of greed and selfishness that Margaret Thatcher epitomized.
Update: And the Gini coefficient, via Doug Henwood.
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